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Yes, there would be a world of difference between President Obama and President McCain

On a Thursday in
mid-May, the U.S. Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a
decade ago. Led by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators — Democrats
and Republicans, liberals and conservatives — gave Rupert Murdoch and
his fellow media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe
don’t expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill. With a voice vote
that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from
hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators
moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media
consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own
daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the
same local market.The removal of the historic bar to
newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big
Media. They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media
properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and
creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that’s great for the
bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a
nightmare for democracy.That’s just some of the good news at a time
when the media policy debate has been redefined by the emergence of a
muscular grassroots reform movement. Bush administration schemes to use
federal dollars to subsidize friendly journalists and illegally push its
propaganda as legitimate news have been exposed and halted, with the U.S.
House of Representatives approving a defense-appropriations amendment that
outlaws any “concerted effort to propagandize” by the Pentagon.
Public broadcasting, community broadcasting, and cable-access channels have
withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors, and
the GOP Congressional allies they share. And against a full-frontal attack
from two industries, telephone and cable — whose entire business
model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly
privileges — a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality,
the First Amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service
providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular Web sites or
services. So successful has this challenge to the telecom lobbies been that
the House may soon endorse the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.But even though the picture has improved, especially
compared with just a few years ago, the news is not nearly good enough. The
Senate’s resolution of disapproval did not reverse the FCC’s
cross-ownership rule change. It merely began a pushback that still requires
a House vote — and even if it passes Congress it will then encounter
a veto by George W. Bush. Likewise, though public and community media have
been spared from the executioner they still face deep-seated funding and
competitive disadvantages that require structural reforms, not Band-Aids.The media-reform movement must prepare now to promote
a wide range of structural reforms — to talk of changing media for
the better rather than merely preventing it from getting worse. “Media reform” has become a catch-all phrase to
describe the broad goals of a movement that says consolidated ownership of
broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers, and telephone and
cable-company colonization of the Internet pose a threat not just to the
culture of the Republic but to democracy itself. The movement that became a
force to be reckoned with during the Bush years had to fight defensive
actions with the purpose of preventing more consolidation, more
homogenization, and more manipulation of information by elites. Now,
however, we must require corporations that reap immense profits from the
people’s airwaves to meet high public-service standards, dust off
rusty but still functional antitrust laws to break up TV and radio
conglomerates, address over-the-top commercialization of our culture, and
establish a heterogeneous and accountable noncommercial media sector. In
sum, we need to establish rules and structures designed to create a
cultural environment that will enlighten, empower, and energize citizens so
they can realize the full promise of an American experiment that has, since
its founding, relied on freedom of the press to rest authority in the
people. Despite all the revelations exposing government
assaults on a free press, too many media outlets continue to tell the
politically and economically powerful, “Lie to me!” Five years
into a war made possible by the persistent refusal of the major media to
distinguish fact from Bush administration spin, we learned this spring
about the Pentagon’s PR machine’s multimillion-dollar
propaganda campaign that seeded willing broadcast and cable news programs
with “expert” generals who parroted the White House line right
up to the point at which the fraud was exposed. Even after The New York Times broke
the story, the networks still chose to cover their shame rather than expose
a war that has gone far worse than most Americans know. Recently we have seen an acceleration of the collapse
of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like Walter Cronkite are
appalled by the mergermania that has swept the industry, diluting
standards, dumbing down the news, and gutting newsrooms. Rapid
consolidation, evidenced most recently by the breakup of the once-venerable
Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale of the Tribune Co. and its media
properties, and the swallowing of the Wall
Street Journal by Murdoch’s News
Corp. continues the steady replacement of civic and democratic values with
commercial and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have
less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls are being
made by consultants and bean-counters, who increasingly rely on official
sources and talking-head pundits rather than newsgathering or serious
debate. The crisis is widespread, and it affects not just our
policies but also the politics that might improve them. There are two
critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical of official
statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous in the search for
truth. One of them is war — and in the case of the post-9/11 wars our
media have failed us miserably. (Even former White House press secretary
Scott McClellan now acknowledges that the media were “complicit
enablers” in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and says, “The
Iraq war was not necessary.”). The other issue is elections, when
voters rely on media to provide them with what candidates, parties, and
interest groups often will not: a serious focus on issues that matter and
on the responses of candidates to those issues. Instead, when the
Democratic race was reaching its penultimate stage, the dominant story was
a ridiculously overplayed discussion about Barack Obama’s former
minister. Before the critical Pennsylvania primary, studies show, the
provocative Rev. Jeremiah Wright got more coverage than Obama’s rival
for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. And forget about issues — the
most covered policy debate of the period, a ginned-up argument about
whether to slash gas taxes for the summer, garnered only one-sixth as much
attention as Wright. Viable democracy cannot survive, let alone flourish,
with such debased journalistic standards. Despite some remarkable recent
victories by grassroots activists, our media still fail the most critical
tests of a free press. This is an impasse that cannot last for long, and in
all likelihood the outcome of the 2008 presidential election will go a long
way toward determining which side, the corporate owners or the public, will
win the battle for the media. The stakes could not be higher. The next president will
make two important decisions. The first will be whether to accept
media-reform legislation or veto it. There is little doubt that Congress
has shifted dramatically as a result of popular pressure. Corporate
lobbyists who used to worry only about battling one another for the largest
slice of the pie know that the game has changed. The 2008 elections will
almost certainly increase support in both houses and from both parties for
media reform. Second, the next president will appoint a new FCC
chair who will command a majority of the commission’s five members.
This is a critical choice. The right majority would embrace the values and
ideals of the thousands of media critics, independent media producers, and
democracy activists who are gathering this weekend in Minneapolis for the
fourth National Conference for Media Reform. Dissident commissioners
Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, who have battled the FCC’s
pro-Big Media majority on issues ranging from media ownership to Net
neutrality and corporate manipulation of the news over the past four years,
will both address the conference. If Copps, the senior of the two, is named
chair, this savvy Washington veteran is prepared to turn the agency into
what it was intended to be by Copps’ hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt: a
muscular defender of the public interest with the research capacity and the
authority to assure that the airwaves and broadband spectrum, which are
owned by the people, actually respond to popular demand for diversity,
competition, and local control. After years of battling to block rule
changes pushed by corporate lobbyists, Copps has called for what he has
named theNew
American Media Contract, saying, “I’m sick of playing
defense.” Copps has urged that we “reinvigorate the
license-renewal process” by returning to standards set during
Roosevelt’s presidency, when “renewals were required every
three years, and a station’s public-interest record was subject to
FCC judgment.”Don’t look for a President John McCain to hand
Copps the chairmanship. There is a clear difference between McCain and
Obama when it comes to what the candidates say about media issues and an
even clearer difference in their records. Although many GOP voters, and
some backbenchers in Congress, are supportive of media reform, the
commanding heights of the party are a wholly owned subsidiary of the media
giants. On the surface McCain may appear to be a complex figure who
straddles the fence. In the increasingly distant past he occasionally
tossed out a soundbite recognizing citizen concerns. But in recent years he
has invariably championed the corporate lobbies. McCain’s free-market
rhetoric about government-created and indirectly subsidized media
monopolies is increasingly recognized for what it is: propaganda to advance
the policy objectives of massive corporations. More than a decade ago McCain voted against the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which gave the green light to media
consolidation. He also loudly opposed the efforts of commercial
broadcasters to quash low-power noncommercial FM broadcasting in 2000.
Progressives applauded in both cases. But as chair of the all-important
Senate Commerce Committee, which was responsible for implementation of the
Telecom Act, the Arizona senator resisted numerous opportunities to
mitigate its worst excesses. The hallmarks of McCain’s
“leadership” have been a failure to promote the public
interest, hypocritical pro-consumer rhetoric that hides pro-business
action, a fundamental misunderstanding of technology and economics, and
troubling and at times scandalous loyalty to particular special interests. Although most of the attention to The New York Times’
investigation of McCain’s relationship with Vicki Iseman, published
in February, was focused on speculation about romantic entanglement,
shockingly little attention was paid to the revelation that in 1999 McCain
had, as Commerce Committee chair, pressured the FCC to issue a critical
TV-station license to Paxson Communications, for whom Iseman was lobbying.
McCain’s approach was so aggressive and so out of bounds even for
corporate-cozy Washington that then-FCC chair William Kennard complained
about the senator’s attempted intervention. Paxson’s executives
and lobbyists contributed more than $20,000 to McCain’s 2000
presidential campaign, and its CEO lent McCain the company’s jet at
least four times for campaign travel. The senator’s symbiotic
relationship with Paxson and telecom giants like AT&T is rarely
mentioned on the Straight Talk Express. Also unmentioned is the crucial role McCain played in
shaping the Bush-era FCC. It was McCain who personally and aggressively
promoted Michael Powell to serve as FCC chair and who defended
Powell’s attempts in 2003 to rewrite media ownership rules according
to a script written by industry lobbyists. While other senators objected to
those rule changes after more than 2 million Americans communicated their
opposition, McCain sought to preserve them. And he remains joined at the
hip with Powell, who unabashedly thinks the job of government is to promote
the interests of the largest communication firms. In May Powell represented
the McCain campaign on a panel discussion at the annual conference of the
National Cable & Telecommunications Association. It is unlikely that McCain would reappoint the
disgraced Powell as chair, but it is reasonably certain he would appoint
someone who shares Powell’s deafness to the pleadings of public
interest. The senator’s 2006 vote against maintaining Net neutrality
suggests that his commitment to the business objectives of AT&T
outweigh any commitment to the public interest. Straight-talk soundbites
notwithstanding, McCain will be a reactionary force on media issues across
the board. Barack Obama is
different. Obama’s campaign has produced the most comprehensive,
public-interest-oriented media agenda ever advanced by a major presidential
candidate. Like Hillary Clinton, the Illinois senator has been an outspoken
defender of Net neutrality. The Obama camp’s position paper on media
issues echoes Copps when it says that as president he “would
encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the
development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and
clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the
nation’s spectrum.” In a recent speech Obama called for
strengthened antitrust enforcement, specifically warning against media
consolidation. An Obama presidency would, he and his supporters say, use
all the tools of government to promote greater coverage of local issues and
better responsiveness by broadcasters to the communities they serve. Like
Copps, Obama favors investment to connect remote and disenfranchised
communities to the Internet and to make public broadcasting a more robust
voice in the national discourse. Although a President Obama would almost certainly be
different from a President McCain on media issues, the extent of the
difference remains open to debate. Would Obama actually make Copps or
someone like him FCC chair? Would Obama move immediately and effectively to
break the stranglehold of media lobbyists? That is by no means certain.
Though his stated policies are encouraging, competing forces are struggling
to influence the candidate. Industry money is going to Obama in
anticipation of his victory. He is a self-styled party centrist, and in
recent Democratic Party history “centrism” has usually meant
putting the demands of moneyed interests ahead of those of rank-and-file
citizens. The good news is that many of Obama’s younger advisers are
products of the media-reform movement or have been influenced by it. The
bad news is that others, like Clinton-era FCC chair Kennard, have records
of compromising with the telecom industry. So while some Big Media will be
betting on McCain, they won’t give up easily on Obama. What Obama’s candidacy offers, then, is an
opening and — if we dare employ an overused word from this campaign
season — a measure of hope. The proper response to that opening is
not celebration but vigilance and determination. Obama’s positions,
though sometimes vague, do allow us to imagine securing increased funding
for public and community broadcasting, a broadband build-out that allows
all Americans to realize the promise of the Internet, and a new approach to
the licensing and regulation of the people’s airwaves that respects
the public interest more than Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line. We can
anticipate the development of creative policies to promote and protect
viable independent journalism and local media. The right president will
make achieving all these ends easier. The right Congress will make the task
easier still. But above all we will need the right media-reform movement
— one that is aggressive in its demands regardless of who sits in the
White House, savvy in its approach to the FCC and Congressional committees,
bipartisan and determined to build broad coalitions, and focused not just
on playing defense but on shaping popular media for the 21st century. Robert McChesney is research professor in the
Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John
Nichols is the associate editor of the Capital
Times of Madison, Wis. This article also
appears in the June 16 edition of The Nation.